Foothills

They came down into the town at first light with the frost still on everything and the tower blinking its patient light against a sky going pale, and the men were waiting for them, because the men were always waiting, because that was the country now and had been for years and would be for years after her.

There were four of them. Older than the town children, near her own age or past it, which made them a rarer and worse thing, and they came out of the dead streets around the brick building without hurry, the way people come who have done this many times and know how it goes. They had guns and they had the look. She had seen the look on the porch at camp on two boys who had it a little, and she had seen it grown to its full flower on Carla, and here it was again wearing four faces, the look of people for whom another person had stopped being a person and become only a thing that might have something.